A few days ago I logged into my Facebook and went through my news feeds. One particular status update caught my attention. Was from this really pretty girl I knew from before and she was talking about this 5-star hotel that she was on holiday at. So I curiously went in to see how she was doing and she was doing well! She had a new boyfriend… a new rich boyfriend. Then I remembered how she always had a rich boyfriend. I mean she changed bfs a few times I think but all of them had one thing in common, they’re all rich. How does she do it?
Google “How to marry a rich man” and you’ll find so many articles teaching you how.
You’ll even find courses teaching people how to find and marry a rich man.
Most interesting link I found was this article on Forbes.
Heck there are even so movies about it. Like the famous HK movie that I quite liked called “Marry a rich man”.
Now here’s my take on this. Somehow in modern society, women who go after rich men are frowned upon. I used think like that too until one day I read an article about an interview with Donald Trump’s wife.
In the interview they asked her if she would be with Donald Trump if he wasn’t rich.
Her reply
“Would Donald be with me if I weren’t beautiful?”
I thought that was the smartest answer I could hear. It’s true. Think about it. Society accepts men who go after women just purely because a woman is beautiful but frowns upon women who go after men because of money. Why? Both money and looks are equally superficial. It’s just one of those things society has decided to draw the line on.
So I on the other hand have a much more balanced view. I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all if a woman goes after a man because of his money…. as long as I go after beautiful women.
Now in my view, the decision to be with someone is never solely based on money. It’s always a list of different things with different proportions.
So for some girls, looks is 20%, money is 20%, personality is 40% and well… the list goes on.
Girls who go after men with money or “gold diggers” as Kanye West would call it mainly differ only in the proportion. Sure it does matter whether the guy has a good heart and his personality does matter. But maybe a lot less importance is placed on it compared to money. So while a normal girl may have 20-50% of her decision to be with someone based on money, a “gold digger” would have say 50-90%.
So I started thinking of all the girls I knew who placed a lot of importance in money in the guy they went out with. Some of them are discreet about it but some of them are really open about wanting to marry a rich guy. Perhaps it’s because I don’t judge them for it and I’m equally open with them. I told them that I totally wouldn’t mind marrying a rich girl too. Or perhaps they don’t mind telling me some secrets because I don’t fall into the category of rich guys that they might go after.
I often asked them how they went about meeting these guys and here’s what a few things I gathered.
1) Rich People Hang Out With Rich People.
So if you meet one of them and you hang out with him long enough, he’ll probably introduce you to the rest of his friends who are likely to be rich. Remember though that rich is relative. Someone who has RM10 million is rich to me and I’m guessing most of our standards but perhaps to the guy who has RM100 million, RM10 million isn’t considered really rich.
2) Identifying The Rich
This one I actually read from a magazine article once when they interviewed girls who went after rich guys. They asked the girls how they knew a guy was rich and they pointed out a few things:
i) By the clothes he wears
ii) By the car he drives. You don’t always get to see it so look out for the car keys.
iii) By the watch he wears. If he wears a Swatch or ToyWatch like me then probably not going to cut it. If he wears a Tag Heuer then he’s above average. But if he wears a Rolex or Patek or Panerai or any of these high end watches then you’ve hit the jackpot. The watch thing is often accurate.
Sure there are fake Rolexs and Pateks but unlike fake bags that girls carry, guys don’t normally wear fake watches. I don’t know.. maybe it’s because we get less peer pressure but if we can’t afford an expensive watch we just don’t buy one. My friends all wear watches far more expensive than mine but I never felt the desire to buy one myself.
At least I think that’s accurate for now. I think by the time we reach the age of 40 does peer pressure really come up to us then.
3) Being A Good GF
This one is something I learned from a Hong Kong girl at university. Her life long plan is to do one thing. To marry a rich man! It’s not because she can’t earn her own money or anything. Nothing like that. In fact she’s a pretty good student and she’s really smart but well… some people long to grow up to be lawyers, doctors… she just wanted to grow up marrying a rich man.
Throughout my years of uni I would see her go around getting to know guys whom she knew came from rich families. She was close to my housemate but she hardly talked to me. Maybe because my cheap jeans and jacket gave it all away. She did once make a move on a fellow Malaysian friend of mine though. Someone had whispered to her that he came from a rich family in Malaysia and lived in a big house. She suddenly added him on MSN and started talking to him… asking about what his family does and all that (in a very subtle way).
While many rich kids studying in the UK aren’t afraid to flaunt their families’ money, this guy was all about keeping it low. So he downplayed whatever his family did and said it wasn’t true about the house and all that. Right after that conversation, he never ever once heard from her again. I didn’t see this girl again after graduation but my ex-housemate was close to her. One day she told my housemates the secrets of “keeping” a rich guy (and my housemate passed that knowledge to me one drunken night).
Here’s what she said:
i) Learn to cook.
Guys like girls who can cook. Not just learn to cook but learn to boil soup too when the guy is sick. So when he’s sick you can have him drink the soup and tell him all the good herbs you put inside to help whatever illness he has. That’ll give him the motherly love he would miss from back home.
ii) Learn to play games with him.
This is if he plays console or computer games. Learn to play it well enough for him to find it fun enough to play against you but don’t beat him or it’ll hurt his ego.
iii) Be good in bed
This I need not explain right?
So after she graduated she went back to Hong Kong with a degree from a good university. What did she do? She went to work in Goldman Sachs. Not as a banker or analyst but as a personal assistant to the investment bankers there. I asked my housemate why ? Why work as a PA when she definitely could have made it as an investment banker and she said that it was just a good way for her to meet rich investment banking dudes.
The happy ending to that is… this girl I knew got married a couple of years ago. Not to an investment banker or to the son of a rich tycoon. She married a policeman in Hong Kong. So I guess while she was chasing someone with money all along, she later learned that true love was more than enough for her.
I guess there’s no right and wrong in life. It’s just a matter of what makes us happy. I know many girls who didn’t marry rich and still have the happiest marriages ever… and girls who did marry rich and have unhappy marriages. I guess we all make decisions in life based on what we think fits us best and right or wrong, we have to live with them.
So do we really need to marry rich?
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space